This is the future the fossil fuel industry has in mind for you and your children.
Only minus blue skies, birds, fish, animals, clear water, soil and food.
The number of U.S. oil drilling rigs—a proxy for activity in the oil industry—has fallen sharply since prices headed south last year. There are now 54% fewer rigs compared with a peak of 1,609 in October, and Friday’s report marks the 19th-straight week of declines.
North America experienced an unprecedented decline in drilling activity during the first quarter, which drove pricing pressure and margin compression across all product lines. First quarter revenue declined 9% and operating income declined 54%, year-over-year, compared to a 21% reduction in the United States land rig count. Activity has dropped approximately 50% from the peak in late November and we expect to continue to see pricing pressure for our services until the rig count stabilizes.
Active rig counts will keep plunging until at least July, when Morgan Stanley forecasts the counts will bottom. On Friday, data from oil driller Baker Hughes showed that the number of US oil rigs in use fell by 26 to 734 during the prior week, the lowest oil-rig count total since November 2010.
Downtown, clutches of men pass their time at the Salvation Army, watching movies or trolling Craigslist ads on desktop computers. The main branch of the public library is full, all day, every day, with unemployed men in cubbyholes. And when the Command Center, a private temporary jobs agency, opens every morning at 6am, between two and three dozen people are waiting to get in the door.
Some of these job seekers are sleeping in their trucks, in utility sheds, behind piles of garbage by the railroad tracks, wherever they can curl up.
Only a year ago, Williston’s shale oil explosion was still gushing jobs. From 2010 to 2014, thanks to the Bakken shale oil patch, it was the fastest growing small city in the nation. Williston nearly tripled in size, from 12,000 to 35,000 people. But the number of active rigs used to drill new wells in the Bakken dropped to 111 in March, the lowest number since April 2010, according to state figures. Low oil prices have prompted drilling to slow down, and companies big and small have been laying off workers and cutting hours.
City officials paint a rosy picture. They cite North Dakota Job Service reports that maintain there are 116 jobs in Williston for every 100 residents, point to North Dakota’s ranking among oil-producing states (number two, after Texas), call the oil production slowdown a blip and say the oil patch is still growing.
But the city’s job numbers do not match the reality on the ground. At the Command Center, oil jobs have dropped by 10 percent since last Fall, said Kyle Tennessen, the branch manager. Compounding the job shortage, laid-off oil workers were competing with others for construction jobs and everything else, Tennessen added.
Some migrants have already left, or are planning to, according to the local UHaul companies. They report fewer people renting vans and trucks to move into town and more laid-off workers renting vehicles to move out.
The rest are becoming Williston’s version of day laborers. They compete for low-paying jobs such as picking up trash, doing laundry and mopping floors, that make enough for them to eat, but not enough to afford a place to live. (The average one-bedroom apartment in Williston costs $2,395 a month.)
WILLISTON, N.D. – Snowflakes and tumbleweeds whip past dismantled stacks of steel that used to be hundreds of oil workers’ livelihoods.
Four massive drilling rigs, idled on the windswept prairie near the North Dakota-Montana line here, wait for oil prices to rise again. Last year, when oil was selling for $100 a barrel, each rig employed almost 200 people, directly or indirectly. Now, with oil prices cut in half, they employ Shay Hunt, the night watchman.
“Over there, that was my rig,” said Hunt, a 35-year-old father of three from Williston, who has worked the oil fields for more than 13 years.
“Rain comes, 40-below comes, lightning and tornadoes come, we keep working,” he said, facing away from the downed rigs and into the biting wind blowing in from the west. “One time a [grass] fire a came up around the rig. We kept on working.”
But there’s a new threat to the oil fields. One you can’t work through.
After a six-year epic oil boom that has transformed both the economy of North Dakota and the lives of its people — sending unemployment to record lows and development and budget surpluses to record highs — the drop in prices is beginning to alter the landscape here. Half the rigs have been idled, costing thousands of oil workers their jobs with more layoffs likely to come.
“Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.“